


Pink Light

by plasticdaisy



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Library, Fluff, Humanstuck, M/M, Meet-Cute, One Shot, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-11-28 21:56:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20973671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plasticdaisy/pseuds/plasticdaisy
Summary: Dave is not a fan of the feeling of being watched in the library, but discovers the value in people-watching when encounters an attractive stranger who can't find a seat.For my boyfriend.





	Pink Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KittyMotor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyMotor/gifts).

I can’t help but tap my foot while I wait in the library.

I force my eyes to dart across the unimpressively beige carpeting of the library floor – I’m looking for a distraction that I won’t find. Despite the fact I pride myself in being someone who appears collected in public, there’s something about being in the library that makes me feel bare.

I can feel the eyes of the other patrons on me as I glance back at the mass of black boxes and wires on the desk beside me. There’s really no way to be cool in a library; the silence is deafening, and every action made has an inherent awkwardness that is bred from such a unique social space.

It’s pretty crowded, too, but that’s what you get in a college library.

I look back down at my laptop, which is chugging away at an agonizingly slow pace. It’s pretty old, but I don’t really have any other choice. I bend down, squinting at the unmoving progress bar. _Estimating time remaining my ass, _I think to myself.

“Excuse me,” an unfamiliar voice calls from behind me, and I feel myself bristle as I turn on my heel.

“Uh – hey, yeah,” I murmur, rubbing the back of my neck as I look the stranger up and down. His eyes are searching my face; he can’t meet my gaze while I’m wearing my shades.

He’s attractive – once I get past the fact that he scared the shit out of me. Standing with his arms crossed, I can see his muscles twitch under the intricate map of tattoos on his skin. He’s wearing one of those hoodies cropped into a tank top, and I’d say it made him look like an asshole if he didn’t have a face that rivaled the beauty of Michelangelo’s David. He’s shorter than me, but I’m positive he would be completely capable of taking me down if he wanted to, though I wouldn’t admit it to anyone but myself.

“Is that your stuff?” he tilts to his head to the floating desk to the right, where my ratty backpack and skateboard sit strewn across its surface.

I nod.

“Do you … _need_ it there? It’s pretty fucking crowded in here, and I can’t find a seat,” he frowns at me, and the piercing in the bridge of his nose shifts as his brow furrows over his eyes, which have a sort of familiar warmth – they put a feeling in my chest that I can’t place. 

“… Oh, yeah, I guess not,” I glance at my laptop, feeling unreasonably displeased with the idea of stepping across the few feet between myself and the desk. I’m not concerned with someone stealing my things, I just feel … exposed. I feel my lips twitch and I try my best to hide the deep breath I take as I move to pull my things off of the unoccupied desk, shifting them to lean against the table of clunky, library gadgets I’m using.

“Thanks,” his reply is somewhat dry, laced with the sentiment that I should have some _manners_. I don’t blame him. He puts down his bag, settling in the chair. I find myself still observing him as he pulls out a few notebooks and a bag of colorful gelly-roll pens. His eyes shift over to me as I lean back against the desk behind me, crossing one leg over the other.

“Is it just me or is there a distinct lack of _discretion_ in this room?” his tone is sharp as he turns to face me, swinging one of his legs out from under the desk. It makes me wonder if he’s one to typically speak loudly, because his voice is so tinged with lost volume it becomes a hiss.

“A guy can’t people-watch?” I offer nonchalantly.

“If I’m not mistaken, ‘people-watching’ denotes, I don’t fucking know, not staring directly at the person right next to you?”

The muscles around his lips twitch up into an expression somewhere between disgust and contempt as he speaks. It’s kind of hot.

I shrug, prompting a sigh to slip past his lips – which, accented by his silver snakebites, I realize look like they’d make for a good kiss. I avert my eyes quickly, darting back to the stack of books on his desk. He shifts his whole chair, now facing me and spinning a grey pen in his right hand.

“I don’t know why, but I’ll bite. So, why are you here, then, People-Watcher?”

“Mm,” I reply, “I don’t think I put out any bait.”

The stranger raises an eyebrow.

“Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

I glance back at my laptop, feeling confliction stir at the base of my throat. On one hand, this is the sort of interaction I dread in a setting like this; if it isn’t already nerve-wracking to be doing this in the first place, I’d practically be stripping myself down into the feeling of nakedness that came with exposing what I’m doing here. But there is something in the stranger’s eyes that felt … different than the judgement of a passerby. A warm, understanding brown, they are tinted with curiosity and impartiality, despite the harshness of his witty tongue.

Running a hand through my hair, I take a slightly more obvious breath than the one I took earlier. It shakes its way past my lips, betraying a façade I had otherwise believed to be rock-solid. With the way the stranger’s fingers twitch, I suddenly doubt my own skills in maintaining my cool but dismiss the thought almost instantly. After all, I was brought up to know better than to shed my entire personality to someone I’ve just met.

“… I mix music,” I reply in a hushed tone, a little too bashful for my liking, “but this dinosaur of a laptop somehow doesn’t have a disk drive. I wanted to burn a CD, so I came here to use a remote drive.”

I drum my poorly-painted fingers on the hot, humming disk drive, which is still hard at work on the fourth song on the CD – the fourth of ten.

The stranger raises an eyebrow.

“What kind of music?”

There’s a spark in his gaze. The interest is intimidating.

“I dunno,” I raise my eyebrows, shifting uncomfortably, “… just, like, whatever.”

“Mm,” the stranger grunts, crossing his legs, “for someone so interested in what I was doing, you’re being pretty secretive.”

I let a smirk fall across my face, feeling the confidence slip back into my body as the conversation shifted towards banter.

“I’m a man of mystery, what can I say. It’s hot, isn’t it?”

“… Hardly,” the stranger rolls his eyes, “are you at least going to tell me your name, oh-mysterious-people-watcher?”

“Only if you return the favor.”

“I’m a man of my word.”

“I’m Dave,” I introduce myself, holding out a hand, “Dave Strider.”

The stranger takes my hand, shaking it firmly.

“Karkat Vantas.”

As I pull my hand away, I cross my arms over my chest, raising my eyebrows.

“So, Karkles: hit me. What brings you to the library on this fine, autumn afternoon? Wait – don’t tell me – you’re here to hit on the local library skater-stud, right?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Karkat deadpans, “… and I’d drop the ‘Karkles’ bullshit before I make it my personal mission to steal your fucking kneecaps,” despite the growl in his voice, his lips twitch upward into a playful smile. It’s handsome, and I push down the feeling in my chest that says _I want to see it again_.

I raise my hands in pseudo-surrender, and he continues.

“I’m a writer – well, fuck, sort of. That’s a hell of a word to grapple with. But, uh … yeah. It’s hard for me to concentrate at my place, so I come here to work on my stuff,” he rubs the back of his neck, and with the way his hair is styled, it looks fuzzy and soft where he touches it.

“What do you write?”

“Well, until you’re feeling ready to disclose the contents of your ‘mixes’, Strider, I don’t see why I owe you that far of an explanation.”

The way he says my name makes something stir in my stomach a little. I feel our conversation winding down, and I suddenly understand that this a moment for an important decision – to make Karkat a stranger in a library, or to take things into my own hands. As his eyes, warm, brown, and curious, meet mine, I make my decision.

“I’ll do you one better,” I reach into my back pocket, pulling out my phone and unwrapping the earbuds coiled around it, “I’ll let you listen to one of them if you let me read a page of your stuff.”

Karkat stiffens a little, his brow furrowing. I see his gaze move between myself and the notebooks floating in his peripherals. I can practically see the gears shifting in his head as the considers the offer. This is his side of the decision: to let me go, or to help me cultivate the feeling in my chest when he looks at me. I hope he has the feeling to.

“… Okay,” he nods, turning and pulling an empty chair from the messy and occupied table to his left. I glance back at my computer for a moment, before settling into the chair and adjusting my earbuds to ensure they’re plugged in; the last thing I need is to blast anything in the otherwise silent library, let alone one of my own mixes.

I hand Karkat an earbud, and he leans in as I queue up the track.

It’s a relatively new one; one on the CD I’m burning. It’s a pretty odd mix, pulling from Cake’s “The Distance” and a few tracks from Macross 82-99. It leans into a few beats I made myself, including a sound I pulled from the sound of a plastic fork against the chipping paint on my windowsill. And, for the sake of sweet, sweet irony – it ends on a record scratch.

I’m nervous, but I can see how Karkat’s head bobs along to the beat, and it quells some of the anxiety building in my chest. When the song is over, he pulls out my earbud, offering me a look of genuine admiration – fuck, it makes my heart speed up to see the smile spread across his face and the way his eyebrows raise.

I have a feeling he has a shit poker face.

“That was really good – like, shit. Really good.”

“Thanks,” I murmur, unable to help the grin that splits across my own cheeks. I feel myself flushing a little and cough, raising a hand to shield my cheeks.

“Are you really that flustered?” he nudges me. His hands are warm. He’s still smiling as he continues to tease me, prodding me with a finger, “that blush is kind of cute on you, I won’t lie.”

I stick my tongue out at him, only prompting him to smile wider. A laugh breaks free from behind his lips, hushed because of the silence around us. Nonetheless, it explodes across his face with the beauty of a firework, leaving sweet laugh-lines and smiling eyes.

I scoot closer to him, and he leans into me a little. God, he’s so warm. I try to force the butterflies from my chest with a deep breath, but with my exhale I only feel more lightness in my stomach.

“So, do I get the honor of a page?”

“… I guess so,” it’s Karkat’s turn to look bashful, and I can see a tinge of pink on his cheeks as he starts to shuffle through his notebooks. It’s really charming. As he flips through the pages, he starts to talk idly about his work, and I find myself fascinated as I follow his every word intently. I could listen to him talk forever.

He finally decides on a passage, very clearly marking with his pen where he wants me to start and stop. As my eyes flick down the page, his words fly through my head with new meaning, circling me like the shimmering color of falling leaves whisked through the autumn wind.

Karkat moves a tad closer, his leg brushing against mine.

I’ve never believed in love at first sight. I’m not the type to be enamored with meeting eyes with someone at a subway station or reveling in the ‘magic’ of seeing someone attractive across a room at a party.

I look up from the neatly organized page of the first of many notebooks I would browse at that little library desk, and I suddenly understand love at first _read. _I see the light in Karkat’s eyes in every word he pens down, and I feel the warmth in his heart as his hands slowly makes its way to curl into mine. He introduces me to his novel-in-progress when the excerpt is done and I’ve laid down my many praises, excitedly telling me his ideas. I hand him my phone as I flip back to the first page, and he happily slips my earbuds back in, smiling as he scrolls through my tracks.

I look up from his notebook one more time before I begin, just to take in the soft expression of joy on his face.

My heart joins hands with the butterflies in my chest.

I don’t think Karkat believes in love at first sight either, but I hope he’s met love at first listen.

**Author's Note:**

> titled after the song of the same name by MUNA. the whole album is fantastic, 10/10 would recommend.


End file.
